young
soul of being an untrue, unblessed world; its high dignitaries many
of them phantasms and players'-masks; its worthships and worships
unworshipful: from Dan to Beersheba, a mad world, my masters. And surely
we may say, and none will now gainsay, this his idea of the world at
that epoch was nearer to the fact than at most other epochs it has been.
Truly, in all times and places, the young ardent soul that enters on
this world with heroic purpose, with veracious insight, and the
yet unclouded "inspiration of the Almighty" which has given us our
intelligence, will find this world a very mad one: why else is he, with
his little outfit of heroisms and inspirations, come hither into it,
except to make it diligently a little saner? Of him there would have
been no need, had it been quite sane. This is true; this will, in all
centuries and countries, be true.

And yet perhaps of no time or country, for the last two thousand years,
was it _so_ true as here in this waste-weltering epoch of Sterling's and
ours. A world all rocking and plunging, like that old Roman one when the
measure of its iniquities was full; the abysses, and subterranean and
supernal deluges, plainly broken loose; in the wild dim-lighted chaos
all stars of Heaven gone out. No star of Heaven visible, hardly now to
any man; the pestiferous fogs, and foul exhalations grown continual,
have, except on the highest mountaintops, blotted out all stars:
will-o'-wisps, of various course and color, take the place of stars.
Over the wild-surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares
of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic
phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an
ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking
fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun,--though visibly it is
but a Chinese lantern made of _paper_ mainly, with candle-end foully
dying in the heart of it. Surely as mad a world as you could wish!

If you want to make sudden fortunes in it, and achieve the temporary
hallelujah of flunkies for yourself, renouncing the perennial esteem
of wise men; if you can believe that the chief end of man is to collect
about him a bigger heap of gold than ever before, in a shorter time than
ever before, you will find it a most handy and every way furthersome,
blessed and felicitous world. But for any other human aim, I think you
will find it not furthersome. If you in any way ask practi